Excel Easter Egg - Excel 95 Hall of Tortured Souls

1. Open Excel 95 with a blank work sheet
2. Go down to the 95th row
3. Select the whole row
4. Tab over to coloum B
5. Goto Help/About
6. Hold down ctrl-alt-shift and click on the tech support button
7. A window appears call "Hall of Tortured souls"
8. At the end of the hall and all the programmers names
9. Do a 180 turn and type excelkfa. Walk thuorgh the wall and see the pictures.

Pictures and Videos

Comments

I had a lot of fun exploring this egg one night.. and I won't give away a ton of stuff, but here's some 'navigation' assistance:
'Arrow' keys control movement.
The 'C' key makes you look down, the 'D' key makes you look up.
You can only look as 'low' as horizontal.
As stated in previous posts, you can go through walls.
If you go through a wall with a window, you go all the way through.
If you go through a wall without a window, you go INTO the wall and are surrounded.
You can enter the columns.
Exiting a wall or column is the same as getting into it.
There are 3 levels, and 4 basic rooms in each level of the Hall of Tortured Souls.
Octagon, Main Court, Zig-Zag, and the Gallery.
The room you start in I'm calling the 'main court', at one end is the 'octagon' room.
In front of you are 3 'pools'.. you can walk across them.
If you go to the Main Hall on the bottom level, those 3 pools become 'rooms'you can enter.
At the other end of the court is the 'zig-zag' room.
The zig-zag room is behind the wall that disappears if you type in 'excelkfa'
The zig-zag room is 3 levels high.
If you mis-step you fall off the zig-zag to the bottom level.
You can go INTO the zig-zag itself.. it's just a wall.
After the zig-zag room is the Gallery with pictures.
If you enter the Gallery from the Top level, you can go to the Zig-Zag room and look down.
If you enter the Gallery from the Middle level, you can go across the zig-zag the other way.
If you enter the Gallery from the Bottom level, the Gallery is 3 levels high.
From the bottom, in the Octagon room, I once went through each stair..it took forever.
If you go 'outside', you can just walk away.... forever. I've never found anything out there.

Another room is hidden inside the 3-D Hall of Tortured Souls. To visit this room, follow these steps:
go back down the stairs, face the opposite wall, and type EXCELKFA.
The wall disappears, and you see a treacherous, zigzagging bridge that leads to a second room.
Use the arrow keys to cross this narrow bridge safely.
When you arrive at the secret room at the end of the bridge (not an easy task!), look around to see pictures of the Excel developers hanging on the walls!
To exit from all of this, follow these steps:
Click on the Close button in the upper-right corner of either room (or both rooms).
The rooms disappear.
Click on the Close button in the upper-right corner of the About Microsoft Excel box.
The About Microsoft Excel box disappears.
Click on the Close button in the upper-right corner of the Workbook’s menu bar or select File-->Close from the menu bar to exit the Workbook.
To exit Excel, select File-->Exit from the menu bar or click the Close button in the upper-right corner of the Excel window.

I have a book with the procedure for the hall of tortured souls in it. It says at the end of the zigzag bridge you will find a terrible secret. What is it? It's got to be worse than a bunch of pictures of the developers. Thanx.

If you've played Doom or Doom II, this is very familiar. At the time, M$ was working on a Win95 port of Doom, and apparently, the Excel developers got their hand on some of this code. Also, many people will recall EXCELKFA as being familiar. Remember in Doom how IDKFA was the cheat for all keys, all weapons, and full ammo? I am THORUOGHLY comvinced this egg is based on Doom.

When you're on the stairs, try to Ram yourself through the wall on the left. You should get outside of the Hall, and you can go around the back and see the people(that were in the room across the catwalk)!

kfa is a Doom code (idkfa) it gives life, ammo and guns. In more computergames you see more of the Doom-codes (iddqd and idkfa are the most). Look at Earth Worm Jim for example. There is the code iddqd+idkfa!

Actually, to pass through a wall easily, hit a wall at a shallow angle, then turn slightly so you're not facing the wall. Repeat this 3 times and you should go through the wall. Once, I tried this on the wall that would disappear if you typed "excelkfa," and the zigzag bridge looked inverted. At the other side, you should see a normal bridge. If you go through a weird gap, you can still see the inverted bridge! And what he means by "Tab over to column B" is to press the Tab key so B-95 is white unlike the rest of row 95.

In Excel 97, I have opened a place with a purple landscape. There's a grey area where the credits scroll. To move is extremely hard (have to use the mouse, and I finally figured out how to move backwards and forwards). Is this the Hall of Tortured Souls? If so, where do I go from here? Is that all thre is?

I went to a website once where it described this, except they made it sound scary, in fact, that whole page was about a conspiracy that Bill Gates was the anti-Christ and they said that there was something really eerie on the wall that you said was just programmers.

very randomly i found a 'big building' with programmers' names and some white-red stuff on it.The scrolling names remind me the prices on stock index screen~ i've submitted 2pics and hopefully they will be out in a few days.By the way did anybody ever been there before?

Is there any way to get Excel 95 when you already have Excel 2003? Will my Excell 03 file be overwriting/deleted? How much $ will it cost me? Please email me at [email protected] if you have any information that might be helpful to me!
Thanks so much!

Hi
Although my following comment is relevant to all large easter eggs I thought this was a prime example. While it is fun to find a small easter egg in a program we should be asking ourselves why the authors of Excel 95 added the Hall of Tortured Souls to the program.
As you know, game code and textures require a lot of memory and disk space so why, back in 95 when hard drives were small and ram was scarce, did MS knowingly allow such a large easter egg to be added to an already large program. I say knowingly because no self respecting company would miss such a large addition. The reason was (and still is in my opinion) to make the program seem more impressive to the customer. If a customer brought the highly priced program and it installed within a minute or two then they certainly would not feel like it was a fair price. If however it took ages to install and used up a large amount of system resources then it gives the illusion that it is a highly complicated and hard working program that was worth the price.
In an age where saving a couple of bytes on the date, pre y2k conspiracy, I find it appalling that any company would add megabytes of data to an already bloated piece of software in an attempt to mislead its customers.